Do you need to read Camus before you read Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation? If you read The Stranger ten years ago, twenty years ago, do you need to re-read it? I had a Camus phase, in adolescence. I read The Stranger—and even bought L’etranger, with the ambition of using it to improve my French—as well as The Plague, The Fall, and others whose titles I don’t remember. I know that I read them, because while I bought those books new, they looked used when I gave them away. But books I read when I was a teenager didn’t stay in my brain, or at least these haven’t. Of The Stranger, I remember that mother died today, and ennui, and existentialism, I guess. Smoking. Killing an Arab because of the sun. The last time I thought about The Stranger was… Read More...

At the Writivism festival last week, in Kampala, Uganda, a certain conversational form played itself out over and over again: I know you from the internet, it’s so wonderful to finally meet you in person! I spoke variations on that theme to various people, people spoke it to me, and I overheard people speaking it to each other. Many of the guests at Writivism had already met each other, of course—there was a small reunion of some of the Africa39 writers, for example, who had all met at Port Harcourt last year, and many of the guests came with already-assembled cohorts (the Nigerians who came together, the Kenyans who took a bus from Nairobi, etc). But bylines and facebook profiles and author photos travel much faster and farther than bodies do, those sweaty meat-sacks which lag behind struggling to catch… Read More...

In the context of romantic high fantasy, the show’s sado-masochistic narrative engine had a moderately subversive purpose.

(believe it or not, no spoilers for yesterday's finale, which I haven't seen) I’ve been fascinated by the notion that a rape scene should be (or could be) necessary. “Episode six ending was brutal - but was it necessary?” is a common way of framing it; Vanity Fair declared that “Game of Thrones Absolutely Did Not Need to Go There with Sansa Stark,” while over at Slate, the argument is made that “this particular scene was necessary,” given the grim bargain Sansa Stark had struck. Most striking, to me, was Jill Pantozzi (the editor-in-chief of the The Mary Sue) explaining why The Mary Sue would no longer actively promote the show: “In this particular instance, rape is not necessary to Sansa’s character development (she’s already overcome abusive violence at the hands of men); it is not necessary to establish Ramsay… Read More...

This is a guest post from Rei Terada, one of my favorite thinkers, and a piece which--in view of its timeliness and pertinence--I was delighted to be able to host. Reading Laura Kipnis's "My Title IX Inquisition" prompts the need to consider student-faculty hostilities in a more historical and relational light. Kipnis's article details how she has become the target of student protest and Title IX retaliation complaints. She had published an essay, written in what she calls a "slightly mocking tone" arguing that new codes ruling out consensual erotic student-faculty relationships "infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives." For Kipnis, complaints of retaliation against her appear misplaced because she had never been accused of harassment and therefore had nothing, in her view, to retaliate for; as she saw it, she had simply… Read More...

What is there to say about the “Princess of North Sudan” that isn’t already so incredibly soul-killingly obvious that it feels embarrassingly superfluous to say it? That it’s racist and stupid? Yes, obviously. I mean, are you kidding me? You cannot not be kidding me. You have to be kidding me. It’s like condemning blackface. If you even have to say it, if you have to articulate the actual words, then are we even having the same conversation? Are we even a “we”? What are we even talking about? It feels insane to even have the conversation. We should be better than this. “We” should recognize that massively encouraging and indulging a child’s childish desire to be a princess by trying to invent a country in Africa is not only terrible, weird parenting—and seriously, good luck to that kid in… Read More...

The first PEN event I attended last weekend in NYC, was a gathering of the Elders, “the Witnesses,” a group of old men whose collective wisdom we were invited to witness: Boubacar Boris Diop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Achille Mbembe, and Ng?g? Wa Thiong’o. They were led onto stage, however, and introduced with so much ceremony and praise that there could be no vitality to the event. This was not exactly their fault, not exactly; if you’d already read their work before, you’d probably already heard everything before, a repetition which was what it was. And I’d have paid the price of admission to see any one of them speak, alone: they are each interesting and flawed and vital thinkers, with archives of work that haunt the present, and they aren’t dead yet. They have said so many interesting things, over the years;… Read More...

There are so many excellent ways to not praise Charlie Hebdo, because there are so many aspects of what they do and have done that deserve something other than praise. But it’s very hard to not praise the dead. Especially the martyred dead, for whom praise is compulsory. It’s so hard to say anything about dead people that isn’t praise, in fact, that in order to say anything about Charlie Hebdo that isn’t praise, you need to open by declaring that you condemn their deaths. For example, Arthur Goldhammer’s piece from Monday begins with this extravagant and doomed attempt to inoculate himself against the counter-charge that he is secretly a fellow traveler with terrorists: “There is, of course, no justification for the murder of political cartoonists. Nothing I say should be construed as in any way mitigating the horror of… Read More...

There is a lot to say about Charlie Hebdo. There is a lot to say about the shooting last night in Garland, Texas. They are not the same things, but there is a narrative line connecting those events, and that’s a third thing to say, that it is a story. Precisely because they are not the same things, in fact, it’s important to tell the story as a story, as something other than yet another entry in the perpetual, inevitable, clash of civilizations of us and them and us and them. These events are distinct; there is a chronology and a narrative space that connects point A and point B. If we do not attend to that the story as story -- how it has developed, is developing, will develop -- we will expect the same thing to keep happening,… Read More...

"is it doomed to become Cape Town's 'bush college'?" The University of Cape Town is a beautiful campus, with a great reputation for academic excellence, and it has good pillars and statues as well. Statues and reputations go together. At the center of that amazing picture is a statue of Cecil Rhodes, who is seen above, dreaming of a white empire over Africa. In 2009, protesters annotated his dream: At the University of Texas, the official slogan is "What Starts Here Changes the World," but the one I like better is "The eyes of Texas are upon you." When I walk out my office, if I turn to my left, I can see "The Tower" where the administrators of this university survey the campus; if I turn to my right, I can see the Texas state capitol building. Right: Left: These towers… Read More...

If you didn’t see it on twitter on facebook a few days ago, you may have seen it somewhere like Buzzfeed: Chinua Achebe has died again. First in 2013, and then again in 2015. First as tragedy and then as farce. These sorts of things happen, a bit like forest fires. You can track down the place where it started if you want—as the novelist Porochista Khakpour did here—but to understand and predict a forest fire, you need to pay attention to why there was so much dry flammable material waiting for a spark. That spark is eventually going to come, but the fire only goes “viral” if there’s something there to burn. With Achebe, there was something there to burn. While Facebook and Twitter are excellent vectors for this kind of misinformation, Chinua Achebe is the sort of writer who would die… Read More...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently did a two-part interview with Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu, in which she re-visited the “boy-gate” clusterstupidity for which I was, inadvertently, the…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently did a two-part interview with Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu, in which she re-visited the “boy-gate” clusterstupidity for which I was, inadvertently, the proximate cause. In the second part of the interview, she suggested that I was partly to blame for what happened, because of the way I edited the interview. As she said: “I think the journalist [ZZ: That's me!] could have done more. The interview was long and so he edited it. The reason I said the Caine Prize was over-privileged was because he had talked for quite a bit about how he and his academic friends followed it and read each story and discussed it and what not, and my response was to challenge that kind of over-privileging of the prize. Which is a position I completely stand by. Because he edited out the part where he… Read More...

Journalism is not objective, because nothing is objective. We know that. Objectivity is a myth, an impossible standard: you are not objective, and I am not objective. No one is objective, because objectivity does not exist. The closest we could ever come to “objectivity” is careful adherence to a social norm: instead of thinking weird, dissident thoughts (which would be just your individual opinion), you can spew the conventional wisdom, the truth we know to be true because we all know it to be true. That latter will seem objective. It will seem unbiased. It will seem reliable. On some level, I think, we know this, all of us, and we don’t really expect objectivity from the news media. We’ve learned not to expect that. Yet we complain about how a reporter constructs their account (or how they don’t) because… Read More...

Your brain is good at making you overconfident about what you see and hear, and it works hard to hide your own unreliability from you. You think you hear “words” when someone talks to you, for example, but what you actually “hear” is an over-superabundance of noise—waves and waves of messy sensory data splashing through your ears—which parts of your brain that you have no conscious awareness of quietly and efficiently process and transform all that noise into something that your conscious mind can understand. That quiet intermediation is incredibly important, and quite thorough. Your brain eliminates sounds that it decides are not relevant and where there are gaps in what you hear, it deduces what should fill them, and adds them in. It’s startling to realize and take seriously, but much of what you “hear” has already been heavily… Read More...

Chris Kyle lived by the sword and died by it. If I were religious, I might pray for his soul. I imagine that his soul could use the prayers. He was a serial killer, seemed quite viciously racist, and he said a great many things about himself that appear not to be true, but which would be really horrifying if they were true. He once bragged about killing thirty “looters” in New Orleans after Katrina, to pick just one example, and it’s a good thing he was making that up. Imagine if, in the middle of one of the worst disasters in recent American memory, Chris Kyle set out to execute people who took much-needed food and supplies from the shelves where they had been left. Imagine if he went to New Orleans not to bring supplies and relief, but… Read More...